Patrick Farmer – wild horses think of nothing else the sea

To all who bought and helped with this book, thank you so much. I’m glad it’s out, and I’m glad I can move away from it. I hope, in the recess of all this movement, you found something to enjoy.

BestPatrick

Now available via The Sonic Art Research Unit, and distributed by Compost and Height, is Patrick Farmer’s, wild horses think of nothing else the sea. A work akin to an esoteric notebook, a number of observations scrawled by the author whilst walking long sections of the Welsh Coast last year.

Farmer’s first effort, try i bark, was published by Compost and Height and Organized music from Thessaloniki in 2012. His new publication sees him thinking away from the floundering individual striving to tame the ear, and toward structure, the resultant and welcome uncertainty of assured form that takes place in the senses.

During May and June of 2012 I walked half, or thereabouts, of the Welsh Coast. Starting in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, a small town on the isle of Anglesey in the shadows of the Menai Bridge, I headed west, leaving the island a week later, having bedded down beside corsican pine and under sunny gorse, whilst being chased by far too many bulls and St Mark’s flies – when I was younger I was unfortunate enough to witness a particularly virile bull leaping over a barbed wire fence, as if his muscular and dense form were an illusion, the ripples all over his body being not-in-fact muscles, but balloons. This memory has stayed with me and as a result I tend to veer on the ridiculous side of caution when encountering such creatures – still, I only had to drop my pack and run the once! Though I did also have to jump into a stream to avoid a herd of pregnant Frisians. Why on earth I started walking during this season I’ll never know.

I’ve written so much about why I went on this walk, what I hoped to achieve, that I barely know myself why I did it, beyond my strong ties with Wales. So I’ve called this work a series of observations. It’s not a book, so to speak, nor a diary, nor poetry, and neither is it some kind of almanac. The closest and simplest I can cut it is that each page is akin to an individual spine of a male dandelion. A thing as at home by a motorway as it is in a field. The bald sun, the head upon which the spines once grew, is the now absence of idea, the memory of previous environment.

The observations contained on the pages desire of no overarching polemic, I am not out to teach people how to hear, or to sing the praises of walking or of that ever confusing term, nature. They are all of them chance or premeditated encounters, the imagination involved in such a task was practically laid out for me as I moved through it.